Acclaimed author and wonderful human Eden Robinson is here to discuss what it's like to have your book turned into a movie! Eden chats with Mica about what a mind trip it is to visit a film set and hear actors saying lines you wrote, and why she ultimately prefers writing novels over screenplays. Eden also talks about why she chose her home town of Kitamaat Village as the setting for the book and movie version of Monkey Beach, and why pipelines are such a fraught issue in northern coastal towns. She also teases her upcoming trashy band council romance novel, and doesn't that sound great?
Reading Room
My mother asks why I cry
I tell her the world is so sad so unfair so far too much
And my words are not enough
I cannot hold the tears back
So I fill buckets and lakes and moats
Everything’s late this year.
Nothing’s dissolved since my last visit to Waterloo—
an evening at the park staring at geese
and we took turns
pushing each other on swings,
pretending we were children.
today breaks open
in a sudden rain
on hot asphalt
every drop distills into
vapors.
Gymnasts are brave and like to brag about how much pain they can take. Girls who couldn’t handle it were pulled out of class and enrolled in ballet. They were going to be disappointed when they learned the truth about that one, too.
Currently on Newsstands
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Room 41.3, Queer
Edited by Leah GolobIn this issue:
Adèle Barclay, Joelle Barron, Nicole Breit, Mary Chen, Lucas Crawford, Jen Currin, Pamela Dodds, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Jess Goldman, hannah harris-sutro, Leah Horlick, Sam Jowett, Ness Lee, Annick MacAskill, Alessandra Naccarato, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Marika Prokosh, Amal Rana, Siobhan Roca Payne, Leah Sandals, Hana Shafi, Arielle Spence, Samantha Sternberg, Sanchari Sur, K.B. Thors, Corey Turner, Jackie Wykes
.
Interview Room
Split Lip's Marianne Chan & Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice talk about how their collaboration works and extends to the writers who submit to their work to their lit mag. Rachel asks Marianne about jealousy in art, and Kaitlyn gets pretty specific about how to know when you're writing flash or longer fiction. Plus, the interview gets even more collaborative when they turn the mic on host Rachel Thompson to discuss writing routines.
Room was excited to have the opportunity to sit down with Billy-Ray Belcourt to chat about obsessions, long form poetry, and struggle at the edge of language. Billy-Ray Belcourt appears at this year’s Vancouver Writer’s Festival in several events including The Poetry Bash on Friday, October 19th at Performance Works.
When Room decided to launch a Short Forms Contest a few years ago, we wanted to create an avenue for writers who write flash fiction, non-fiction, and/or prose poems—and perhaps writers who experiment with blending and bending genres—to submit their work. (Contest entrants are not required to clarify which genre they are writing in.) The contest itself was kind of an experiment, but two contests and more than 450 submissions later, we are now running the third contest (deadline: November 1, 2018).
Reviews
What if three of your older siblings died at age eighteen after they left town? The narrator of Mah’s first novel, Chrysler Wong, longs to leave the fictional town of Spring Hills, Alberta, but is paralyzed by her belief in a curse against her family.
Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing is a timely and important contribution to literature, and to conversations about anti-black racism in popular culture . . . This novel should be read within this context, giving pause for reflection and examination on how we allowed ourselves to get here, and how we can move forward.
Many of Thom’s poems deploy this bold, storytelling voice, foregrounding the wisdom of what is said, experienced, lived, rumoured, and gossiped in lieu of traditional history with its myopia of normativity. a place called No Homeland consistently examines the collisions that marginalized identities encounter.
Room with a View
Room's Poetry and Fiction Contest 2018: The Shortlists
After much deliberation, our poetry and fiction judges, Vivek Shraya and Zoe Whittall, have determined the shortlists of our 2018 Poetry and Fiction Contest! Congrats to the following thirteen writers whose work—or works—have been chosen.
Announcing the Long Lists for our 2018 Poetry & Fiction Contest
Next week, we will be announcing the shortlists of each category, as chosen by judges Zoe Whittall and Vivek Shraya.
